Saturday, January 18, 2014

MITx course injects science into the global warming debate - MIT News Office: "Emanuel and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences also hope to change the dynamic around the study of climate change on the MIT campus. In part because the course is not a requirement, and in part because of the perception among students that climate-change study is mostly about politics and not hard science, the on-campus course has not seen the enrollment levels Emanuel would like to see. “Part of the problem is all the publicity of global warming has sent out a message that global warming is highly politicized, and has nothing to do with science,” he says. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”"

3 comments:

Who would want to take a course from a professor who believes the science is closed on the subject of global warming?

I took a graduate course once from a professor who was convinced that, "Because Spain is a Catholic country it cannot be true that the people practice birth control."

He marked down my research paper, Population Geography of Spain from A to B.

I ended up with an overall 3.9 GPA instead of 4.0. So his obtuseness had no adverse effect when I applied for a grant to do a PhD.

Based on his world view, the professor ignored all the evidence I had compiled and analysed.

There was no way I could have predicted this. During his lectures the professor would sit, close his eyes, and recount to us his travels through the vineyards of Spain, Italy and Greece. He knew a lot about wine but not much about the people of those countries.

For a politicized subject like climate science, prior commitment of the lecturer to a particular world view would warning prospective students to look elsewhere.